


1860: Vin Tanner

by Deannie



Series: Eighteen-Hundred-and-Sixty [1]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Gen, Supermagnificent AU, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 04:10:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7251553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was weeks later when it happened, when the bones first started punching through his skin, bleeding and aching and setting him to pray to the God that hadn’t saved his mama and probably wouldn’t save him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1860: Vin Tanner

**Author's Note:**

> This is an answer to my hc-bingo card prompt "Wings."
> 
> Sort of seemed destined for the Supermagnificents, no?

He was seven or eight years old when the pain started. Subtle at first—a vague ache in his back like he’d taken a hard fall playing with his friends, but constant, and nothing brought relief. After a while it was more a burning, like coals under his skin, and the medicine man, Quiet Flame,  said there was a power in him, fighting to get out. Sahpooly, his Indian mother—the woman who had taken him in when he came to the People—told him not to be afraid, but he was. All the time. His real mama had died in pain before his eyes, long and lingering, and somewhere in his little mind, he figured he was going to do the same. 

It was weeks later when it happened, when the bones first started punching through his skin, bleeding and aching and setting him to pray to the God that hadn’t saved his mama and probably wouldn’t save him. 

Seemed like a cruel joke, all of it. He should have died when that stagecoach crashed into the river months and months ago, but the Kiowa had saved him, saved him and Jerusha and others besides. And now he was going to die anyway, though of what, he wasn’t clear. Something horrific and inhuman, that was certain.

Sahpooly and Quiet Flame and Mammedaty all prayed for him, told him not to worry. He wasn’t dying and he wasn’t evil and he was theirs regardless and they loved him. They didn’t speak English too good, and while Vin spoke Kiowa as well as any young child not born to the language could, the promise that “the wind was calling him” sounded too much like he should go ahead and get ready to die. Jerusha, his sister in everything but blood, was as scared as him but fascinated, too. She drew pictures for him so he could see what she saw: arms sprouting from his back like bird wings, fuzzed with a baby’s growth.

In quiet times, when the pain wasn’t much, when he and Jerusha sat quiet by the river and nobody was watching, he was as curious as any young boy might be. He stretched the wings that had no feathers and bent them forward to look at them. The wings were strangely light, like the rest of him—a strangeness that he’d never really thought on before now, though he had always been so much lighter than other boys his age. The wings weren’t bones alone, of course—there was skin and membranes like a bat and the fuzz that said that maybe, maybe, one day he’d have feathers. 

At eight, that should have been amazing, but Vin was cannier than most children his age and he’d seen how the white men treated the Indians, how they treated anyone who wasn’t like them. He’d lived that before he ever even met the tribe, watched the overseers treat him and the other orphans like garbage and worse. He only let himself feel the wonder of it for a briefest second when it welled up, before reminding himself that he’d never live a normal life. Even at that tender age, Vin Tanner knew that people were supposed to fit in, no matter what his Indian family tried to teach him.

His mama could have told him, had she lived, that he was exactly nine years old the day he woke from another daze in the sweat lodge to find the first of his pin feathers coming in and the pain of transformation easing. Mammedaty, the Indian chief who had always called him Lallo, or “little boy,” now called him Kudo-ee, “baby bird”. Sahpooly, whose name meant “owl,” helped him learn to preen the wings as they grew. She tried to help him understand that he was safe, he was home, he was human, but he wasn’t really sure that any of those things were true anymore. 

He tried to grow, adapt, survive, but he never really  _ lived _ …

Until the day he turned ten and launched himself into the air and flew, his hollow bones explained as his wings bore his weight, his jet black pin feathers catching the wind and twisting him unexpectedly. In the second of falling before the updraft lifted him back into the air and the wind blew through his feathers like a nearly-forgotten motherly embrace, he knew that, human or not, safe or not, in the air above his village, he truly was home.

*******  
the end


End file.
